There are certain mainstays of the Black Thanksgiving table: mac and cheese, greens, and sweet potato pie. Always sweet potato pie, and (according to many, many people) never pumpkin.
But climate change will increasingly be a factor in holiday cooking, with extreme heat, droughts and deluges, and other weather affecting agricultural production. It’s why, around this time of year, you see lots of headlines like, “Climate change could soon make these staple Thanksgiving dishes more scarce.”
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According to that story, from ABC News, sweet potato production could drop by 12 to 18% in parts of the South, the heart of American sweet potato farming, by 2060. Which could indeed mean sweet potatoes that are both more expensive and harder to come by.
But there’s good news about sweet potatoes in our uncertain climate future, too: they’re a crop that everyone will probably be eating more of, and that will be grown in more and more places as the climate continues to change.
Like potatoes, sweet potatoes were likely first domesticated in what is today Peru, but unlike cold-hardy potatoes, they’re a tropical crop, thriving on heat and humidity. It’s why they’ve been growing for thousands of years in places like the Caribbean and South Pacific (though it’s a bit of a mystery how the plants managed to make their way around the globe before 1492), and why in the United States they’re one of the few vegetable crops that California isn’t the leading producer of.
They’re a major staple crop (the fifth most important globally) that has the potential to be more resilient than, say, wheat or rice.
Rather, the bulk of American sweet potatoes are grown in North Carolina and other Southern states, where the hot and sticky summers are both suitably long and humid enough for growing the tropical plants.
Those Southern summers are changing too, of course, with record high temperatures and weather that oscillates between dramatic storms and periods of drought — all of which makes it tough to grow things. But while both drought and flood conditions can hurt sweet potato yields, they’re a major staple crop (the fifth most important globally) that has the potential to be more resilient than, say, wheat or rice.
As other crops take a hit, sweet potatoes “could help fill the gap, since that robust root crop has the potential to produce food under high temperatures,” according to the International Potato Center.
There has already been a big push in sub-Saharan Africa to increase sweet potato production among small-holder farmers — who, as individuals, grow on a tiny scale but together produce a bulk of the food in the region — to plant more sweet potatoes. The rainy seasons that farmers depend on to water their crops have become increasingly unreliable, and a new variety of orange-fleshed sweet potatoes bred to be both heat- and drought-tolerant is one potential solution.
Even in New England, where pumpkin pie rules supreme, some home gardeners and small farms are now growing sweet potatoes. They need to be grown under fabric tunnels, which protect them from spring frosts and help create a warmer growing environment in the summer, but considering that sweet potatoes were a non-starter in a Northeast garden a decade or two ago, it’s a noticeable shift. So it could be that there will actually be more sweet potato pie in Thanksgiving’s future, not less.